July 2026 · Confidential
BRIEF & ASSESSMENT
Mānuka Performance is a Māori-led New Zealand advanced bioactive nutrition company with live commercial operations in the United States and South Korea. We manufacture precision nutrition systems built on PolySure™ — a proprietary 7-polyphenol bioactive certification platform derived from New Zealand's native honey spectrum — verified to ISO-17025 and unlike anything available from NZ or global competitors.
This brief outlines our rationale for prioritising China as our third major export market, the specific channels and products we are targeting, the in-market engagement we have already undertaken, the capability and resource requirements we have assessed, and the compliance and regulatory landscape we have reviewed.
We are not approaching China from a standing start. We have NZ Embassy engagement in Beijing, CBEC channel conversations underway, and direct peer learnings from independent NZ brands whose China CBEC models closely mirror our intended approach. We are ready to move from assessment to execution — and we are seeking an experienced in-market advisor's input to stress-test our assumptions and refine our go-to-market approach.
Chinese health and wellness consumers are converging on a specific set of purchase drivers: verified overseas provenance, authentic cultural and indigenous story, premium positioning over commodity alternatives, and defensible scientific validation behind functional claims. Individually, competitors can offer one or two of these. We believe Mānuka Performance is one of a very small number of brands globally able to credibly combine all of them in a single product stack.
Priced and presented against the top tier of the CBEC health category, not commodity honey or mass-market supplements — consistent with how Chinese consumers already value NZ-origin health products.
Manufactured, formulated and sourced entirely in New Zealand — trading on NZ's food safety reputation and clean-green brand equity, genuinely trusted by Chinese health consumers rather than asserted as marketing.
A genuinely Māori-led company, with taonga species data and formulation IP held under kaitiakitanga-based guardianship frameworks — an authentic indigenous story competitors cannot replicate or acquire.
Native NZ Mānuka honey and Gold Kiwifruit combined into a functional carrier system — not a single-ingredient commodity, but a proprietary matrix purpose-built for gut health and performance outcomes.
Every batch verified against seven polyphenol markers under our PolySure™ standard, with FDA GRAS probiotic status and an active clinical trial programme — defensible validation, not label claims alone.
Purpose-built across two of China's fastest-growing wellness sub-categories — daily gut health support (GI-PRO™) and sports energy & recovery (LiquidFuel™) — not a single-use, single-occasion product.
Our primary market is the USA. Given current geopolitical and trade policy uncertainty — including tariff risk and shifting bilateral relationships — over-reliance on a single export market carries meaningful strategic risk. China is not a pivot away from the US. It is a deliberate, portfolio-based hedge that strengthens our overall export resilience.
South Korea has given us operational infrastructure, Asian market regulatory familiarity, CBEC-compatible product formats, and export logistics capability that directly reduce China entry risk. The same compact sachet format performing in Korea's endurance market translates directly to China's health consumer CBEC channel. Korea and China are sequential, not competing.
China accounts for NZD$19.3B in NZ annual exports — our single largest trading partner. NZ's food safety reputation, FernMark provenance credibility, and clean-green brand equity are deeply trusted by Chinese health consumers. We are not entering an unfamiliar market. We are leveraging NZ's most established trading relationship.
China's CBEC gut health and premium wellness supplement market exceeds $12B. NZ-origin probiotics, bioactive honey, and gut health products are actively sought by Chinese consumers and CBEC operators. GI-PRO™ — our gut health system combining Mānuka bioactive matrix with BC30™ (2 billion CFU, FDA GRAS) — maps precisely to this demand.
We want to be direct: thorough in-market preparation matters, and we have taken that seriously. The following summarises the substantive in-market engagement and research we have completed prior to this brief.
We see our domestic and China-facing science tracks as sequential layers of the same trust architecture, not competing priorities.
The Bioeconomy Science Institute's Biodiscovery Platform and the He Ara Whakahihiko funding streams are our domestic R&D and validation base — where formulation science and PolySure™'s underlying polyphenol tracking get funded and peer-reviewed on home soil. This is the platform that produces defensible, publishable science.
The China–New Zealand Joint Research Centre for Food Safety & Nutrition, and the International Joint Laboratory for Modernization of Traditional Chinese Medicine, give us a route to Chinese-soil clinical data — the credibility layer that matters for Chinese HCP, telehealth and regulatory audiences in a way NZ-only data doesn't automatically transfer.
Each of the three cities on our second delegation is, on its own, a larger consumer economy than most single countries we will ever enter. Our approach is to name two or three anchor cities and go deep, not spread thin chasing national coverage.
NZ Consulate relationship, Hongqiao Pinhui live-commerce infrastructure, highest CBEC platform density. Natural launch city for Tmall Global / JD.
Jinan University research relationship, manufacturer contacts, and Narnia Biotechnology — the B2B ingredient and Greater Bay Area distribution node.
Healthplex Expo access gives ongoing category and competitor visibility — a standing intelligence channel rather than a near-term commercial focus.
Rather than building China capability in-house, our approach is to appoint a partner who already is the ecosystem, and let them localise positioning and drive consumer pull-through through strategic influencer relationships at a speed and cultural fluency we cannot replicate from Whakatāne. We retain what compounds in value — store accounts, trademarks, and first-party data — regardless of which partner we appoint. This is one of the specific questions we want to work through with NZTE: how to evaluate and sequence a TP agency or distribution partner relationship correctly for a company at our stage.
Alongside the CBEC and B2B ingredient channels above, we are evaluating a third structure — introduced through an existing trade contact — that we want to stress-test with NZTE and our Beachhead Advisor before committing capital to it. It is a capital-light, agency-style entry: a partner with a live online platform and established in-market buyer relationships handles promotion and demand generation entirely at their own cost, while we hold pricing discipline at wholesale rather than deeper distributor-buy levels.
The structural logic is straightforward. In a conventional distribution arrangement, we would price deep to compensate a distributor for the marketing spend, sampling, and demand-generation risk they carry. In this model, the partner absorbs that cost entirely — affiliate marketing, social/KOL content, and platform merchandising are run and funded by them, not us — while still delivering order volumes broadly comparable to a distribution arrangement. That combination is what makes wholesale-level pricing defensible rather than a discount we are giving away for nothing.
We intend to structure this as a bounded pilot rather than a standing commitment: non-exclusive, single-platform or single-territory scope, a 6–12 month term, and a modest opening order across one variant each of GI-PRO™ and LiquidFuel™ Kiwifruit before considering any scaling of exposure. In return for the marketing and sampling cost the partner is absorbing, we expect verified sell-through reporting — not just order volume — so we can distinguish real consumer demand from partner-side stock-building before extending terms.
This sits deliberately alongside, not in place of, the CBEC and B2B pathways above. If it validates, it becomes a third proof point for the combined China channel model; if it does not, the capital exposure and reputational cost are both intentionally small.
Because we carry zero China-side marketing cost and zero sample wastage under this structure, our wholesale floor sits meaningfully above a typical distributor buy-in price — we are not paying for the demand generation, so we should not price as if we were.
A modest discount (3–5%) released only after 2–3 consecutive reorder cycles confirm real sell-through — not opening order size — protecting us from rewarding stock-building rather than genuine consumer sales.
A materially higher volume/long-term reference price kept in reserve for any future larger distribution agreement or second China channel, so the pilot partner is not disadvantaged and we retain negotiating room.
China's cross-border e-commerce health and supplement category is the primary entry point. Chinese consumers actively seek NZ-origin gut health and immune support products — NZ provenance is a genuine purchase driver, not merely a label claim. GI-PRO™ is our designed CBEC launch SKU: compact daily-use sachet, FernMark certified, ISO-17025 verified bioactive honey matrix, BC30™ probiotic (2 billion CFU, FDA GRAS), with an active RCT providing clinical credibility.
Our target platforms are Tmall Global and JD Worldwide. We have reviewed listing requirements, understand the CBEC regulatory documentation needed (CoA, FernMark, NZ MPI compliance), and have had initial operator-level conversations. Pricing is positioned at a significant premium to domestic Chinese alternatives — consistent with NZ-origin health product positioning across the platform.
Parallel to the consumer CBEC channel, we are targeting the Chinese nutraceutical manufacturing and food service sector as a B2B ingredient customer. We supply PolySure™-certified bioactive honey formulation systems — not commodity ingredients. Each batch carries an ISO-17025-compliant Certificate of Analysis verifying seven polyphenol markers. This standard is not currently available from other NZ honey suppliers to this market, and positions us as a premium, differentiated ingredient partner rather than a price-competitive commodity supplier.
Narnia Biotechnology (Guangzhou-based importer & distributor) has expressed genuine interest across two distinct sub-channels: PolySure™ as a raw ingredient input for other manufacturers' formulations, and separately, honey as a functional sweetener/ingredient input for bubble tea and RTD beverage manufacturers — a large, fast-moving category. Both sit outside Blue Hat health food registration entirely, governed by general trade and GB additive/ingredient standards, making this channel materially faster to activate than any CBEC consumer SKU.
Our target accounts include supplement contract manufacturers, functional food and beverage brands, and food service operators in our anchor cities (Guangzhou/GBA primarily) seeking NZ-origin bioactive ingredients with verifiable quality credentials. Anchor account target: 3–5 contracts by end of Year 2.
We recognise that China presents a materially different regulatory and operating environment from South Korea and the United States. The following reflects our current understanding, and the specific areas where an experienced in-market advisor's input would be most valuable in stress-testing our approach.